Get To Know Perry

Co-Founder Perry Weitz Shares How He Made Weitz & Luxenberg a Successful Firm for His Clients

Perry Weitz always aspired to be an advocate for everyday Americans with nowhere else to turn. When he began his legal career, he quickly blazed a trail to help mesothelioma victims and took on powerful corporations. His early success led to the beginning of Weitz & Luxenberg, a firm that continues to promote his mission, 30 years later.

What spurred your interest in pursuing a legal career?

I’ve always wanted a career that allowed me to advocate for the “little guy.” I decided to attend law school as a stepping stone to pursuing a career in politics. Shortly after I graduated from Hofstra University Law School, I became involved with the AFL-CIO through a law school friend.

The union was looking for an attorney who could help members diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis caused by work involving asbestos exposure. The union members were struggling to find attorneys willing to represent these individuals because most personal injury attorneys were hesitant to take on powerful Fortune-500 companies. As an ambitious, young attorney, I researched the case against these companies and realized how outrageous their conduct was and never looked back.

What case was the most pivotal in your career?

I started working with asbestos clients just as the statute of limitations for mesothelioma cases changed in New York. Prior to 1987, victims of mesothelioma had to bring a case within 3 years of asbestos exposure. However, the disease’s long latency period, which can range anywhere from 20-40 years, left many of the victims without any recourse when they finally showed symptoms. In 1987, New York State amended the statute of limitations to be tied to when the victim was diagnosed with the disease. This gave me the opportunity to take on corporations responsible for causing deadly illnesses in tens of thousands of people.

Suddenly, I was inundated with cases from mesothelioma victims who needed someone to stand up for them. I found it immensely rewarding to help these people change their lives by taking on powerful corporations that other attorneys were afraid to go after. I decided to dedicate myself and my career to helping mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestos victims.

From there, our firm has grown to take on similar cases in other industries where people have been wronged or harmed by corporate negligence. Today, we represent victims of environmental disasters, communities facing chemical water contamination, patients suffering injury due to defective drugs and medical devices.

What do you consider to be your greatest achievement in your legal career?

I’ve had a number of personal achievements and court victories that I am proud of, but the thing I’m most proud of is how I’ve helped change people’s lives and held these companies accountable for their outrageous conduct. When Arthur Luxenberg and I started the firm, we wanted to build an institution for dedicated attorneys committed to protecting workers’ rights, including the legal rights of disadvantaged individuals. I am proud to look around at the work we’ve done and the progress we’ve made to achieve that vision.

From the beginning, our firm has been a strong advocate for protecting consumers from defective medicines and medical devices, as well as environmental concerns. For example, our attorneys were critical to the national Actos litigation, which resulted in a $2.4 billion settlement. We also played a large role in helping to secure a $2.5 billion settlement for defective DePuy ASR hip implants. Major litigation successes on the environmental front include securing full compensation for hundreds of thousands of victims of the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a landmark MTBE $423 million settlement against several of the country’s biggest oil companies for contaminating 153 public water systems nationally.

On a local level, we are currently representing residents in the communities of Hoosick Falls and Petersburgh in upstate NY, who are living with the aftermath of corporate PFOA pollution in the local water system. The firm’s growth over the last 30-plus years has been truly rewarding and I owe its success to the extraordinarily talented and dedicated attorneys that come to work each day, devoted to upholding the values and principles of championing the rights of everyday Americans.

What are some of your personal triumphs?

I’ve been fortunate to be selected for a number of years as one New York Magazine’s Best Lawyers and to be considered a national Super Lawyer. The most significant personal triumph that comes to mind was in 2011 when I was recognized by my peers with the Champion of Justice award by Trial Lawyers for Public and the Mass Torts Made Perfect’s Clarence Darrow Award, named after the leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union. It was also special to be named an Elite Trial Lawyer by The National Law Journal.

These days, it is more rewarding to watch our attorneys at Weitz & Luxenberg win awards for their legal successes. For example, Charles Ferguson was named 2019 Mass Torts New York Lawyer of the Year by Best Lawyers/U.S. News & World Report. Also, we recently found out that our own Danny Kraft Jr. was the lead attorney for the top two largest personal injury verdicts in 2017 by the New York Law Journal. He and a team from Weitz & Luxenberg fought hard to help victims of mesothelioma receive tens of millions of dollars in jury verdicts. Earlier this year, we congratulated our attorneys for outstanding recognitions including: Gennaro Savastano as a Best LGBT Lawyer Under 40, Neidra Wilson as a Distinguished Lawyer by Noticed, Alexandra Shef as one of the 10 Best Personal Injury Attorneys in California by the American Institute of Legal Counsel and Ellen Relkin who received the Gerald B. O’Connor Award from New Jersey Association for Justice.

How has the firm evolved over the years?

The firm has grown tremendously since we started Weitz & Luxenberg back in 1986. We have four locations across the country, allowing us to expand our mission of standing up to corporations and helping those who can’t help themselves.

I’ve seen our work evolve and change over the past three decades as the needs of our clients have changed. We’ve developed strong scientific expertise and resources in our legal practice areas, giving the firm an advantage when companies try to settle a lawsuit early. It’s important to our client’s success that we are able to handle the extensive discovery and motion practice that often accompanies these types of litigation, and we have focused on building that area of our firm, which has contributed tremendously to our strong record in court.

We’ve also expanded our practice to a team much larger than we thought possible 30 years ago. There are currently more than 100 attorneys at Weitz & Luxenberg, including my son Justin and my daughter Lauren, who handle more than 500 cases each year. To date we have helped tens of thousands of people stand up to big corporations and won over $17 billion in verdicts and settlements for our clients. I have helped negotiate $30 billion in asbestos trusts for asbestos victims.

What differentiates Weitz & Luxenberg from your competitors?

Weitz & Luxenberg has the best lawyers who deliver results for our clients. We’ve represented clients from every state in America and have won more than $17 billion in verdicts and settlements for these clients. Our firm always stays on top of industry trends that impact our clients — including asbestos, water contamination, defective medical devices and dangerous drugs. The culture we’ve created at Weitz & Luxenberg attracts a superior team of legal professionals and because of this, each and every one of our attorneys is someone I would trust to represent my loved ones if they needed legal representation.

What’s on the horizon for the firm? How do you see it growing and expanding?

While Weitz & Luxenberg has represented thousands of victims over the years, we know there’s still hundreds of thousands of Americans who suffer from asbestos exposure, dangerous consumer products, medical malpractice, dangerous pharmaceuticals, corporate negligence and environmental damage caused by corporations. I am excited to come to the office every day to make sure our team is empowered to do everything we can to ensure our clients get the best legal advice and representation.

Our original vision for the firm when Arthur and I started Weitz & Luxenberg has always driven our work. We are constantly motivated by our steadfast goal to ensure that Americans have an opportunity and a voice against big businesses and corporations who have caused them harm.

Biography

When I joined forces with Arthur Luxenberg many years ago, we created a firm dedicated to protecting workers’ rights and the legal rights of the disadvantaged while, at the same time, returning something back to the people of New York. Our employees take great pride in knowing that the Weitz & Luxenberg law firm is so often associated with charitable causes and activities. Our efforts are motivated by the firm’s commitment to give something back to the communities in which we live and work.

It can cause even the most ruthless corporate CEO to tug nervously at his shirt collar and gulp hard when told that squaring off against him in court will be the brawny, knock-out-king of a law firm co-founded in 1986 by super attorney Perry Weitz, Esq.

Mr. Weitz — bold and resolute, relentlessly so — is a clenched-jaw champion of justice for the little guy. Always has been, always will be.

No surprise to learn then, that, early in his career, he gained a reputation as the kind of plaintiffs’ attorney capable of convincing corporations prone to digging-in their heels to instead put a case to rest quickly by settling out of court (and, in so doing, spare themselves a devastating confrontation with him in front of a jury).

After launching Weitz & Luxenberg, Mr. Weitz took care to populate the firm with attorneys who shared not only his impassioned views about the price corporations and wealthy individuals must pay for their negligent or willful acts committed against the innocent, but who also shared his energy, his enthusiasm and — above all — his extraordinary depth of understanding about what is possible under the law and along the outermost edges of its continually shifting contours.

U.S. presidents have sought his advice. Likewise legislators, academicians, nonprofit business managers, association leaders, charity directors and many others. The reason is simple: Perry Weitz is a man of ideas, with the clarity of vision that makes his a voice much sought-after — and sought-after in particular by those who lack a voice of their own.

Case in point: 36 shipyard workers dying or dead of the terrifying, aggressive cancer known as mesothelioma, which each of them contracted after being exposed on the job to the toxic mineral asbestos. Outraged over the story of unconscionable suffering and loss told by each victim at their first meeting with him, Mr. Weitz lost no time building a powerful case against the operators of the Brooklyn, N.Y., shipyard where the injuries occurred. So determined was he to win this for the workers that he put practically everything on the line — including his own home, mortgaged to raise money to cover the costs of legal research and evidence gathering. He proceeded despite the skepticism of some veteran members of the personal-injury establishment, who believed the case hopeless and were sure Mr. Weitz would find only ruin in the end.

Instead, what Mr. Weitz found was victory — and a stunning $75-million award for the shipyard workers to compensate them for their massive medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and more.

Mr. Weitz remembers the case as physically and emotionally exhausting, in part because it was tried simultaneously in two different courts — one at the state level, the other at the federal. He also remembers it as worth every last drop of sweat and tears, for it delivered justice far beyond the expectations of the victims. However, the case accomplished something more. It made plain that Perry Weitz and his young firm were together a force with which to be reckoned.

More Paths to Victory

After having played a direct role in obtaining verdicts and settlements that, combined, grew to be worth 5 billion dollars, Perry Weitz decided it was time to hand off the job of engaging in courtroom combat to his team of extraordinary litigators while he focused on other, equally productive avenues of justice.

Settlement negotiations, for instance. Mr. Weitz is a masterful negotiator who has over and over persuaded defendants that it is in their own best interests to agree, out-of-court, to do the right thing and pay the plaintiffs a generous sum in settlement.

The firm’s principal negotiator, Mr. Weitz has in this way wrested from defendant companies hundreds of millions of settlement dollars to end litigations involving asbestos, but also pharmaceuticals (such as DES, Vioxx, Baycol, Zyprexa, Rezulin, Seroquel and others), medical devices (defective hip implants, pelvic mesh, and silicone breast-implants, chiefly), and environmental pollution, community water contamination and toxic exposures (his part in securing a $425-million settlement in a case where gasoline additive was alleged responsible for contaminating groundwater supplies earned him nomination as “Trial Lawyer of the Year” by the Public Justice Foundation). Mr. Weitz over the span of his career has been involved in settlements of more than 1,000 individual cases.

His negotiating skills also prove invaluable in the realm of asbestos bankruptcy trusts where he serves on numerous trust advisory committees that oversee the process by which asbestos defendants, emerging from bankruptcy, are able to set aside funds for victims. Mr. Weitz was appointed as a trustee in upwards of 30 asbestos bankruptcies and helped to negotiate more than $25 billion in settlement trusts for present and future asbestos victims. Mr. Weitz continues to serve on the trust advisory committees of dozens of these trusts to oversee the distribution of these funds.

Wide Recognition Legally and Charitably

With success has come wide recognition. Not only is the law firm that Mr. Weitz jointly built now among the biggest names on the planet when it comes to mass-tort personal-injury litigation, but he himself is celebrated as one who harnessed courage and conviction to make something so great from so little.

Understandably, then, beginning in 2005, Mr. Weitz’s name has appeared annually without fail on the pages of New York Magazine to announce his selection as one of the area’s “Best Lawyers.” He also has repeatedly and consistently earned the title of “Super Lawyer” from a prestige organization that gauges the performance of attorneys across the nation. In 2011, the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice proclaimed him the recipient of its “Champion of Justice” award. That same year, Mr. Weitz received the Mass Torts Made Perfect’s Clarence Darrow Award, named after the leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2012, he was New York City “Lawyer of the Year” in the category of mass-torts litigation and class-action lawsuits on the plaintiffs’ side. In 2014, Law360.com declared him a “Titan of the Plaintiff’s Bar” and The National Law Journal placed him in the “Elite Trial Lawyer” category.

His smashing legal triumphs naturally make him a much-in-demand lecturer and a fixture of national trial-law associations. He serves on the boards of the American Association for Justice, New York State Trial Lawyers Association, Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, Legal Aid Society, and Jewish Lawyer Guild. Additionally, Mr. Weitz chairs the Tort and General Negligence sections of the New York County Lawyers Association. For Hofstra University — his law school alma mater — Mr. Weitz acts as dean’s counsel. He has also dedicated the Moot Court at Hofstra Law.

Perry Weitz holds that no greater source of joy exists in the world than the privilege of providing help to those who lack the means of helping themselves. Thus, volunteerism and its close cousin, philanthropy, are for him potent spurs to action.

He occupies a seat on the board of trustees of North Shore University Hospital, and is a member of the men’s division executive committees for both the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the Children’s Medical Fund. The CMF, affiliated with Schneider Children’s Hospital, has honored Mr. Weitz as Man of the Year. In 2018, Mr. Weitz became a valued benefactor of the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Woman and Newborns at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. This relationship anticipates the inauguration of the “Perry and Felicia Weitz Well-Baby Nursery Suite” at the hospital.

Mr. Weitz focuses his other extensive charitable interests on The Gurwin Geriatric Institute and Colel Chabad/United Soup Kitchens. He also hosts an annual charitable fundraising event, The Gust — Hamptons Charity Invitational Pro-Am, for local communities on the East End of Long Island.

Perhaps one of the charitable efforts closest to Mr. Weitz’s heart is his ongoing commitment to help treat the mesothelioma patients he’s spent his life fighting for — to the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center. Connected to Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the Center’s goal is to expand treatment options for mesothelioma cancer patients by identifying promising immunotherapy drugs. His generous gift is accelerating their research into viable treatments.

Early Sensitivity to Injustice

Perry Weitz was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. Blessed with nurturing parents, they instilled in him at a tender age the importance of resisting wrongdoers, of never standing idly by or looking the other way when the strong use their muscle or positions of privilege to bend and ultimately break the innocent weak.

As a teenager, young Perry Weitz — by then with a well-refined sensitivity to injustice — often felt his hands balling up into fists after discovering that someone, somewhere had been cheated, threatened, roughed up, made to feel fear, or injured.

In his freshman year of studies at Hillyer College, Mr. Weitz decided he could most effectively challenge the cold-hearted, uncaring predators of his immediate world — and those remote to it — by becoming a trial lawyer. The spark that set his mind ablaze for the study of the law was his hearing about the travesty of Love Canal, a community in upstate New York where townsfolk young and old mysteriously took ill with cancer — mysteriously until, that is, investigators put two and two together and realized the residents of Love Canal had been exposed over the span of decades to toxic chemicals wantonly dumped into their water supply by nearby profit-lusting industries. Outrage welled up in Mr. Weitz who then and there vowed to go to law school to learn how to go to court to fight this sort of deceitfulness.

He fulfilled that pledge to himself when, in 1983, he graduated from Hofstra University School of Law with a juris doctor degree in hand. (He came to Hofstra by way of George Washington University, completing its bachelor of arts program in 1981.) In 1985, Mr. Weitz was admitted to practice law in the state of New York; the following year his privileges were extended to include the Southern and Eastern New York jurisdictions of U.S. District Court.

Lengthy List of Reported Cases

Owing to their importance or significance, quite a few of the court cases he tried were immortalized in law books, periodicals and other specialized publications. One example: the matter of George vs. Celotex Corp., reported in 914 F.2d 26, 31 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 30, Prod. Liab. Rep. (CCH)P. 12,644 (2nd Cir. (N.Y.), Sep 13, 1990) (NO. 90-7144, 1339). The George in this case was Marion George. She was the widow of one Stuart George, who worked more than a half-century for a New York-based asbestos-insulation contractor and distributor. During that time, Mr. George was almost daily exposed to asbestos dust in the company’s warehouse. A substantial portion of the dust emanated from products manufactured by a company later known as Celotex. In 1976, Mr. George died of mesothelioma. Some years passed before Mrs. George decided to sue as executrix of her husband’s estate. Accordingly, she retained Mr. Weitz to represent her in that action. Celotex and 15 others were named as defendants. Stirred by Mr. Weitz’s compelling arguments during the court proceedings and again by his summation, the jury found Celotex 90-percent responsible for the death of Mr. George and awarded to Mrs. George nearly one-quarter of a million dollars in damages. Celotex — accustomed to never losing these kinds of cases thanks to the small army of corporate lawyers it could afford to hire — appealed, contending in part that the jury should never have been permitted to consider a particularly damning piece of evidence introduced by Mr. Weitz. In the end, the appeals court ruled against Celotex and allowed the lower court’s judgement to stand. Mrs. George received the justice she sought, and Mr. Weitz acquired recognition as the first New York attorney to have obtained punitive damages against the seemingly Teflon-coated Celotex Corp.

Had Mr. Weitz chosen, he could have kept private his exhaustive knowledge of victory-producing courtroom strategies. Instead, he opted to openly share those insights with others in his profession. In so doing, he helped build not only a law firm but also an entire field of practice within the plaintiffs’ bar.

The list of presentations given by Mr. Weitz in important forums — as a lecturer, as a panelist, as a moderator — is quite lengthy. He has chaired the premier annual asbestos conferences for and with judges and lawyers and insurance companies in New York and Los Angeles for the past decade. A random sampling: he regularly co-chairs and moderates roundtable discussions featuring prominent jurists and their cutting-edge insights from the bench regarding asbestos litigation; in 2008, he co-chaired a symposium and lectured on the topic of emerging trends in asbestos litigation; in 1996, he guided attendees of an American Conference Institute lecture through the intricacies of the then-newest innovative techniques to resolve complex tort litigation.

In a similar vein, Mr. Weitz from time to time shares his knowledge with consumers via appearances in the media. He has been an interview guest on network newscasts, morning shows, public-affairs programs, and more. One of his earliest appearances occurred in 1993 when he was tapped to shed light for viewers of Court TV on the ramifications of a lawsuit alleging dangerous defects in so-called sidesaddle gas-tanks manufactured and marketed by General Motors Corp. Topics on which Mr. Weitz has been interviewed include tobacco lawsuits, silicone breast-implant failures, motor-vehicle accidents and gun control.

Perry Weitz today has every reason to be proud of the law firm that bears his name, and to be proud of the enormous good work it has accomplished — good work now worth more than $17 billion in the form of verdicts and settlements obtained for clients. Seventeen billion. That translates into an abundance of justice for those ordinary people who put their faith in Mr. Weitz and Weitz & Luxenberg to deliver justice.

Speaking Engagements

Sought after as a chair, lecturer, panelist and moderator

Speaks at numerous important forums — only a brief sample of which is listed here